It is known that the business of selecting and improving plants involves the use of the most efficient genetic analysis technologies, identifying as rapidly as possible the plants, notably at the stage of seedlings carrying the genetic combinations of interest. These analyses are carried out from tissue samples of the plants, followed by DNA extraction which will then be analyzed. Similarly, the business of selecting and improving plants implies pathological analysis capabilities: the plants are subject to viral, bacterial or even fungal attacks and it may be necessary to identify these attackers, for example by means of DNA analyses, by sampling from the plant tissues. However, the genetic analysis of the plants, even of their attackers, faces a bottle neck, not in terms of analysis capacity, but in terms of the capacity to supply plant material to be analyzed. In other words, the laboratories generally have the capacity to perform a number of genetic analyses far greater than they do today, provided that they receive sufficient samples of plant material to be processed.
In the laboratories, the technicians now in charge of this task are at the maximum of their capabilities, devoting all their time to collecting samples when they could be employed in more qualified tasks. Furthermore, such repetitive work, presenting a significant level of stress, leads to a certain percentage of errors which can falsify the identification of the plants of interest. Furthermore, the uniformity of the samples risks varying over the course of the operations. In addition, there are risks of pollution of the sample by incorrect handling.
Some automated sampling technique solutions exist, such as, for example, “seed chipping” (automated taking of a biological sample from a seed, for example a seed of corn), but they are not suited to the small size of most of the seeds of the garden species (tomato, lettuce, etc.) and of certain species of large crops (rape seed for example).